1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications, and, particularly, to a call-intercept system and method implemented for long distance telephone systems that verifies call identities in order to prevent fraudulent calling card usage.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The telecommunication industry has estimated fraud losses are costing telecommunication service providers five (5) billion dollars per year. Particularly, telecommunication fraud losses are attributed to lost, stolen, or compromised portable calling card products, e.g., in highly populated areas. Calling card products may be compromised in various ways, for example, via social engineering, xe2x80x9cshoulder surfingxe2x80x9d, etc., whereby a perpetrator obtains a physical calling card or calling card number belonging to another. The final result for the perpetrator is to obtain a calling card product in order to place a call to desired location or termination, whether domestic or international.
Residential customers of large telecommunication service providers, e.g., MCI WorldCom, are typically the prey for these types of fraud, and, industry studies have determined that the fraud losses will only increase in the future.
While service providers may place controls within their networks to limit or prevent calls from a specific origination in the United States to a specific international country terminations for outbound international calls, as well as limit or prevent calls from specific international country originations to a specific domestic termination in the United States for inbound international calls, the fraud pattern migrates to other avenues that have less network controls. Thus, fraud still persists in the form of compromised calling card calls that originate from a specific country and terminate to a specific international location. This is done by circumventing the blocks placed on outbound domestic origination to an international termination calls, and inbound international origination to a domestic termination calls.
It would be highly desirable to provide a system for intercepting first time callers terminating a call to a predefined international location from a specific international origination in order to verify the identity of the caller and control fraudulent calling card usage.
The present invention is directed to a call intercept process (CIP) that functions to intercept callers placing compromised calling card calls for a first time from international locations to predefined high fraud countries terminations, in order to verify the identity of the caller. In operation, a perpetrator who has obtained a calling card product, will have only the physical calling card or the calling card number itself. When the perpetrator attempts to terminate a calling card call to a predefined international location, the calling card call will default to an operator who will ask for the name and account information as it appears on the calling card owner""s billing account. The operator will fail the call if the perpetrator disconnects the call or is unable to provide correct name and address billing information as it appears on the account.
Thus, the system of the invention provides the ability to intercept and verify account information with first time calling card callers placing calling card calls from an international origination to a specific international termination. If the caller fails or hangs up, the card is placed in a xe2x80x9clocked statusxe2x80x9d mode and will be intercepted regardless of the termination location until such time the caller passes an account verification requirement. Once the caller passes, the CIP process places the card in a database and the card is over-ridden from customer interruption with intercept on future calls.
Advantageously, passed and failed call intercept calls may then generate alarms for monitoring by a fraud control system. The fraud control system will review the alarms to determine if actions are warranted to block the calling card.